A professor who's spent years studying effective management says some of the best meetings involve almost no talking

To come up with a more creative idea,
minimize talking in meetings at work.

Instead, have participants write down their suggestions
anonymously and share them.

This way, everyone can share their thoughts without
fear of looking silly.

That's according to Steven G. Rogelberg, author of "The
Surprising Science of Meetings."

Meetings get a bad rap. At best, they often feel pointless; at
worst, they're soul-sucking.

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A new book, "The
Surprising Science of Meetings," aims to revamp meetings'
reputation, with strategies for maximizing their efficiency and
eliminating the pain that comes with them. The author is Steven
G. Rogelberg, a professor of management at the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte who consults for companies including
IBM and Procter & Gamble.

One of Rogelberg's most compelling ideas is the no-talking
meeting (or, at least, no-talking portions of meetings).
Apparently, talking, and specifically group brainstorming out
loud, is where things go awry. Some people are too embarrassed to
share their ideas, while others babble for so long that everyone
else forgets their ideas.

To that end, Rogelberg proposes "brainwriting." Instead of people
talking through ideas together, meeting participants write down
their ideas anonymously on paper. The group leader has the option
to pass around the papers (or place them throughout the room) so
everyone can read them and add their thoughts.

Research
suggests that silent brainstorming yields better and
higher-quality ideas than talking out loud.

Another option is to open every meeting with a period of silent
reading, a strategy to ensure everyone does the assigned reading
instead of just pretending. Only then does a spoken discussion
take place.

Amazon has been known to hold meetings this way.
In an interview at the George Bush Presidential Center in
April, Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos said: "For every meeting, someone from the meeting
has prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo that has
real sentences and topic sentences and verbs. It's not just
bullet points. It's supposed to create the context for the
discussion we're about to have."

Rogelberg sums it up: "If attendees don't share key information
and insights relevant to the meetings goals, especially
information they hold uniquely, the meeting is destined for
mediocrity, at best."